cshlp/rtf

[davidmaxwaterman]

Hi,

I need to preprocess my help files. They're currently done as rtf, which I think is standard practice. Unfortunately, the rtf format seems to be somewhat difficult to preprocess.

I'd like to put in macros such as 'VERSION' and 'APPNAME'.

I could do this if it were html, so I'm wondering if I can have my help files as html instead of rtf.

Wouldn't html be better anyway? rtf seems like a curious choice of format (better than doc, I suppose).

Max.

[davidmaxwaterman]

does no one have any suggestions?

does everyone just end up editing the files manually in the several places that need editing to change the number? it seems like a nightmare to maintain with all the different places that need changing.

any pearls of wisdom?

Max.

[Paul.Todd]

The easiest is to ditch the rtf format and use xml - well that is what I have done. The RTF format it too error prone

http://www3.symbian.com/faq.nsf/AllB...B?OpenDocument

[davidmaxwaterman]

The easiest is to ditch the rtf format and use xml - well that is what I have done. The RTF format it too error prone

http://www3.symbian.com/faq.nsf/AllB...B?OpenDocument

Wow! Great tip. That's just what I'm after. IMO they should use html/css anyway, but XML is just as easy to preprocess, I suppose :D

However, how do I edit an xml file. Regular ASCII is easy enough, but what about Chinese characters and such, which appear as :

& # 25773 ;

(spaces added, since otherwise this tool actually converts it into the correct character :) )

If I open the file with Firefox, I get an error :

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: file:///C:/....asptml.xml
Line Number 3, Column 6:<?xml:stylesheet href="file:///C:/Symbian/8.0a/S60_2nd_FP2/epoc32/tools/cshlpcmp/xsl/asptml.xsl" title="asptml" type="text/xsl"?>
-----^

(it actually points to the ':' in 'xml:stylesheet')

I can open it with something called 'XML Editor' but it just opens MS Internet Explorer to display the file - which is useful enough, since the characters are actually rendered correctly.

How should one edit an XML file? I don't care about the formating, since that doesn't carry over to the phone anyway, but being able to enter and edit characters in non-hex is important ;)

Max.

BTW, I see in the article :

"...but no fix is available at time of writing"

I find that just editing the rtf manually to remove '{...013f...}' makes MS Word 2003 rtf files compile correctly. Maybe that'll help someone...

[davidmaxwaterman]

I've managed to convert the escaped Chinese characters into unescaped ones using this script (in case it helps anyone else) :

#! /c/Perl/bin/perl

use utf8;
use CGI;

@lines = <>;

$all = join( '', @lines );

while ( $all =~ /(&#[^;]+;)/s )
{
        my $this = $1;
        my $new;
        #if ( $this =~ /&ndash;/ )
        #{
        #$new = chr( 8211 );
        #}
        #elsif ( $this =~ /&break;/ )
        #{
        #$new = "<br/>";
        #}
        #elsif ( $this =~ /&tab;/ )
        #{
        #$new = "\t";
        #}
        #else
        {
                $new = CGI::unescapeHTML( $this );
        }

        $all =~ s/$this/$new/s;
}

print $all;

As you can tell, I've been having trouble with a few of the tags, but at least the Chinese text is readable.

It'd still be great if there were a wysiwyg editor...OpenOffice is supposed to be able to edit this stuff, but it just looks like plain text to me.

In the manual, I notice this :

Check the XML proofing copy on a web browser. The style-sheet /epoc32/tools/cshlpcmp/xsl/csptml.xsl allows the output to be viewed as though produced using the default customisation options.

It isn't very explicit on how I should use this csptml.xsl file, in order to view it in a browser. How exactly should it be used and how does it help me?

Max.